How to sound like you are fluent when you’re just a beginner

English often seems more complicated than it is. Language courses often teach you the most formal way to say things, but English speakers are rarely so formal. Here are some quick tips to get you speaking like a native even when you are still a Beginner!

One word answers

The formal way to respond to a question like ‘Do you like Berlin?’ is ‘Yes, I do.’ or No, I don’t.’ However, native speakers usually respond much more informally. Here are some examples.

Positives and negative responses

Contractions are your friends

Native speakers contract words in English all the time, even in quite formal situations. For example, in a business meeting, it would be unusual to hear someone say ‘I would like you to tell me when he has signed the contract.’ Instead, you would hear ‘I’d like you to tell me when he’s signed the contract.’

Try to learn all the common contractions and use them as often as you can – you’ll sound much more fluent immediately!

Common contract to improve your English

Shorten your sentences

English speakers are always shortening their sentences so they can say more, faster. For example, it’s quite common to drop the question word and the pronoun at the start of a sentence. This sounds very informal, but very natural. In some cases, you can drop everything in a question except the noun! Be careful though – this doesn’t work with every sentence. Learn a few examples first, then copy what native speakers say.

Examples

Do you want some ice-cream? – Want some ice-cream?

Would you like some coffee? – Coffee?

Is it good? – Good?

Do you want to watch TV tonight? – TV tonight?

Want to sound even more fluent – brush up your vocabulary and grammar on busuu!

Luciano was a Localisation Editor at busuu. Having grown up in Rome in a bilingual family, languages are a big part of his life. He later moved to London where he studied Computer Games Design and Story Development. You can usually find him playing board games, mooching around art galleries and cooking! He also loves reading and writing.

I’m cheek by jowl with english for quite a time, but still think i cannot speak it as well enough as i desire. This method may help a little with speaking more fluently, but what who wants to speak english (actually, any other language can also be) really needs is to listen to it, hear it and try to speak in it persistently.

Learn a language

Follow us

busuu is the language learning community that helps more than 80 million people to learn languages online. Check out the busuu blog for company news, new product features, tips and tricks to learn a language and cultural insights and stories.